For the LORD has chosen Jacob to be his own, Israel to be his treasured possession. – Psalm 135:4

Today’s Scripture Reading (September 16, 2019): Psalm 135

Early twentieth-century philosopher, Elbert Hubbard, wrote that “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” In practice, those kinds of friends are hard to find. Most of us have been burned at least once by friends who have rejected us, or even worse, betrayed us by sharing private information that they had come to know about us. Finding a friend who knows us yet still loves us can be hard. But these kinds of friends are also essential to living a full life.

While I love Hubbard’s definition of a friend, it is also a reasonably accurate description of what love is and how we can know when we have found it. (And I am not just talking about the romantic kind.) Love sees us with different eyes. Love does not look for a reason to tear us down but instead seeks circumstances when it can lift us up. Love is seldom ever earned. It is best seen as a gift that we give to each other, not really expecting that the gift will ever be returned. But when it is given back to us, an extraordinary relationship is born.

The Psalmist declares that God has chosen Israel as his own; God’s sacred possession. It would be easy to believe that there must have been something special about Israel for God to give this gift to the nation. But the Bible is clear that Israel did not earn it. Jacob was deceiver all of his life, yet God still exalted him. The people of Israel were small and insignificant among the nations of the world. They tended to be whiners. Israel was also historically faithless, never satisfied with the gifts that came from the hands of God, but instead spending much of their history chasing after the gifts they hoped that they could receive from other gods. They even gave the most precious gift that God had given to them, their children, as offerings on the altars of false gods.

Yet God still chose them. God chose Israel not because she was great, but rather because God was great in love. It was a gift given to Israel, even when they refused to return that gift to God. It is this love of God that Moses makes clear to Israel in Deuteronomy

The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments (Deuteronomy 7:7-9).

The same argument is also valid for the rest of us. God chooses us not because of anything that we have done, but because his love is great. And when we decide to return that kind of love, a great relationship is born between our God and us.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 136